According to RFI, kyiv sent more than 200 officers from its army to Libya, a country off the coast of which a Russian LNG tanker suffered explosions. What is Zelensky’s goal? Will the two belligerents increase clashes far from Europe?
Regional wars do not exist, they all have global dimensions: Ukraine and Russia remind us of this. If the vast majority of fighting between the two nations is obviously concentrated in the east and south of Ukraine, the issues are also exported, “projected”, as the military say. There is the Middle East, with Iranian news and the usefulness of Ukrainian know-how in the fight against Shahed-136 drones, but also, now, Libya: according to an investigation by the media RFI, more than 200 officers of the Ukrainian army are stationed in bases set up with the agreement of Tripoli. For what?
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This is perhaps one of the acts that will never be clearly claimed, but everyone is looking in the same direction: on the night of March 3 to 4, the Libyan port authority announced that an LNG tanker from the Russian ghost fleet named Arctic Metagaz had suffered “sudden explosions followed by a violent fire, which ultimately led to its sinking”. In the end, the boat did not sink, but was adrift, without a crew, raising fears of an ecological catastrophe and raising a question to which everyone was convinced they had the answer: who blew up the boat?
Extension of the field of struggle
If the “crime” is not claimed, no Ukrainian official has denied the accusations which immediately turned towards kyiv, which has already widely targeted the Russian LNG and oil tankers of the ghost fleet in recent months. According to the few images circulating, the Arctic Metagaz has a gaping opening of several meters at the waterline, which supports the theory of the explosion of a naval drone heavily loaded with explosives. Since 2022, kyiv has become a master in the art of denying maritime access, particularly in the Black Sea, where kamikaze naval drones – Magura V5 and Sea Baby – have struck numerous Russian warships or merchant ships.
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The LNG carrier was carrying around 94,000 tonnes of liquefied natural gas on board, loaded in the Kola Peninsula, northern Russia, and was heading towards Port Said, Egypt. Moscow immediately accused kyiv, raising a new question: from where could the Ukrainians have gone hunting for the LNG tanker?
This is where the RFI media investigation comes into play. According to public service radio, Libya would allow Ukrainian forces to use at least three sites in the west of the country: the air force academy in Misrata, also used by Western services, but also “a second base fully equipped for the launch of aerial and naval drones, in the town of Zaouia, approximately 50 kilometers north of the capital” and a meeting place “at the headquarters of the 111th brigade of the army”. Still according to the media, Tripoli would benefit from drone training for its own troops, while the country is still unstable after years of civil war.
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At the end of April, the specialized media “Intelligence Online” devoted an article to “Group 13”, a unit linked to the Ukrainian intelligence services which operates clandestinely from a bulk carrier, therefore a civilian boat, from the port of Odessa, with the mission of « tracking the Russian ghost fleet in the Mediterranean ». It is possible that this group was involved in targeting the Arctic Metagaz LNG carrier.
« Africa Corps »
If all this information is confirmed, this would be the first major sign of an export of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine to a third country, a few thousand kilometers from the front. If the war is regional, it is globalizing, since the Ukrainians seem to want to strike wherever Russia has strategic interests: here, the maritime route to the Suez Canal, while Moscow wants to take advantage of the explosion in the price of oil since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
So where will the war be exported next? The African continent seems to be the ideal theater of operations, since Russia has its men there, notably with the presence attested in the past of troops from the Africa Corps, supposed to defend Muscovite interests in Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic…
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On April 5, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky met his Syrian counterpart Ahmed Al-Chareh, in Damascus, to discuss regional security, exchanges of military experiences and… war with Russia, while the latter still has bases in Syria. When the Ukrainian front seems to freeze, the whole planet remains.
